1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a camera apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
A camera apparatus called pan-tilt zoom camera which is attached to the ceiling or a wall of a building or a room is known and disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-110472.
Such a camera apparatus as just described is connected by a cable to a console installed at a place spaced away from a location where the camera apparatus is attached.
An operation command from the console is supplied through the cable to the camera apparatus so that a panning movement, that is, a horizontal turning movement, a tilting movement, that is, an upward or downward rocking movement or a zooming movement are carried out. Further, image data of an image picked up by the camera apparatus is supplied to a monitor apparatus through the cable so that an image is displayed on the monitor apparatus.
Incidentally, for an image pickup optical system provided in such a camera apparatus as described above, it is demanded to achieve image pickup with a greater angle of view near to the wide angle end and image pickup with a smaller angle of view near to the telephoto end in order to achieve improvement in convenience in use upon image pickup. In other words, increase of the zoom ratio is demanded.
However, in design of an image pickup optical system, there is a limitation to increase of the magnitude of the zoom ratio.
Therefore, a conversion lens is mounted on the image pickup optical system by a manual operation to increase or decrease the angle of field of the image pickup optical system.
Also a camera apparatus has been proposed including an image pickup optical system which uses a very wide angle lens called fish-eye lens and another image pickup optical system which uses a zoom lens of a standard zoom ratio.